Chapter Text
12:00 pm
The Simurgh shifted fractionally in her orbit in the thermosphere. Her senses locked onto a target. A locus where several hundreds of thousands of the planet-bound subjects gathered, a hub for transportation routes over land and sea. In the local language, the target was called "Brockton Bay."
The Simurgh studied her target for months, her finely-tuned perceptions searching for vulnerabilities. Charting paths through the vast, branching tree of possible futures. The faultlines where a little push here and another push just so would cause the probabilities of future events to align with her objectives.
On May 16, 2011, the last stray branches were pruned. The paths converged. The outlines of her desired future took shape.
Perfect.
The Simurgh entered a dive. Her wings trailed behind her as she accelerated to the Earth far below, like a bullet fired from the heavens.
It was time once again for an earthly hive of scum and villainy to be cleaned up spick and span by a friendly visit from the Pretty Soaring Solider of Love and Justice!
...
...
The Simurgh descended on Brockton Bay. None of annoying sirens were on yet, thankfully. She had easily outwitted the pathetic surveillance satellites. How stupid were the subjects to trust their surveillance to a tinker construct who was hard-coded with six different perceptual blindspots? Such half-assed security measures stood no chance of stopping the pretty soldier from bringing love and justice to her favorite planet!
The Simurgh took a moment to review her devious plan. Which...wasn't saying much, really. It was a damn simple plan. She had a list of all the nasty woes that afflicted this poor city. She would pop into the city, fix them woe-by-woe, then fly back into orbit and relax with the satisfaction of a job well done.
It was embarrasing to admit, but she had learned through hard experience that she had to keep her plans absolutely dead simple. She had started out with complex, intricate plans weaving the destinies of thousands of subjects, but they...well...they hadn't worked out. To put it mildly. Sometimes she thought it was a cosmic joke. For all that her godlike postcognition and precognition allowed her to theoretically manipulate destinies, her planning ability was absolute crap.
But this time she swore she would make it work. No matter that it hadn't worked in Lausanne. Or London. Or Crimea. Or Madison. Or Canberra, most recently. Unless that Tinker in the quarantine zone ever got his shit together, got over his stupid obsession with turning everyone into combat cyborgs, and got to work saving the endangered species of Madagascar like he was supposed to.
God. That one hadn't even been a subtle message. She had manipulated the man's brain into a state of high receptiveness to environmental stimuli and then fucking showered him in thirty different species of endangered lemurs. And what did the man start making? Fucking combat cyborgs.
In retrospect, she should have picked up on the warning signs that the man was cracked in the head. Like his inane naming convention for his inventions. She had made the lemurs using replicas of the man's greatest works, his Put-In-Chicken-Soup-And-In-A-Right-Jiffy-Out-Comes-A-Brand-New-Synthetic-Liver machine and his Put-In-Organic-Matter-And-Guess-What-Comes-Out?-That's-Right-It's-A-Short-Lived-Clone-Of-A-Creature-Of-Your-Choice machine. So yeah, that man had been a little bit batty. But, but! She had spent so much hard work planning, and she had done such a good job of fighting off her opposition, and she had been so sure that she was going to help the subjects properly for once, and....and then it had all come crashing down on her, and, and-
No. The Simurgh cut off that line of thought. Had to keep her spirits up, had to keep a positive attitude. This time, for sure...!
As she began her work in Brockton Bay, she hummed a tune to herself to calm her nerves. A cheerful little ditty about a multiverse collapsing into a singularity and then exploding with force great enough to propel a pair of solar-system sized entities across galaxies.
The subjects in a mile-wide radius around her simultaneously flinched. Tch. She knew the subjects didn't like her singing very much, but she needed this. It helped her to concentrate.
Besides, there was such a thing as tact. The last time anyone had politely told her that her singing didn't agree with their sensibilities had been during her first concert in Lausanne. Ever since then the subjects preferred to sling juvenile insults, calling her singing a 'blood-curdling scream', a 'hellish cacophany', a 'madwoman's dirge', and so on. And that was when they weren't simply spewing a stream of uncouth vulgarities. So rude!
Well, she was used to it by now. If the subject's didn't like her singing, that was their problem, not hers. She was self-confident and self-actualized and self-everthing else, so no matter how much they insulted her she wouldn't let it get to her. Really. She wouldn't hold their rudeness against them, not even a teeny little bit.
Because she was on the side of goodness. And love. And justice. And this time she would do it right.
She was going to help the everloving fuck out of them.
...
...
There. Look at that utter travesty.
The Simurgh had only been in Brockton Bay for thirty seconds and she already laid eyes on her first target. The place the subjects called "Arcadia High School of Brockton Bay."
It was all wrong. How the hell were the subjects supposed to gain an education in such a frightfully designed place? It would be far more appealing as an N-dimensional fractal torus. She ripped the school grounds apart with her telekinesis, gathering the debris to form a suitable scaffold for her civic revitalization project.
The Simurgh took a moment to focus with her precog, optimizing the layout of her new-and-improved institute of higher education, and-
Oh fuck! Her precog alerted her to two shard-bearing subjects who were flying in the air above the school, directly in the path of her public works project. What the hell were those two doing up there? Wasn't that awfully hazardous? They might get hurt, or even killed!
The Simurgh studied the shard bearers, using her postcog to view their trigger events and thus identify their shards. Aha. The one in a modest t-shirt and jeans was the Shaper shard, being carried in the arms of the garishly tarted-up Bling shard.
Predictable really. The Bling shard was radiating an aura of 'awesomeness' - seriously, 'awesomeness'? So juvenile, Bling. What are you going to give your next bearer, the power to turn into a fucking disco ball that shoots lightsabers? Anyway, Bling's 'awesome' aura was nothing more than a pedestrian manipulation of neurotransmitters in the brainstem and cortex. Yet the Shaper shard was pathetically infatuated by that juvenile trick, turning it's attention to the source of the trashy aura like a flower turning its face to the sun. Pah. For all Shaper's pretentions toward 'high art', it was always 'low art' that held its undivided attention.
Well, aesthetic quibbles aside, the shard bearers had stupidly put themselves right in the path of her civic improvement project. It was almost as if they had planned this, purposefully gotten in the way just to ruin her day. Didn't they value their own lives? Crap, crap crap.
The Simurgh used her precog to track their future trajectories so that she could make a plan to save them. In unconscious response, her levitated cloud of debris shifted to follow the locus of her attention, unerringly following the subjects as they flew through the air. Crap!
The Simurgh lashed out with her telekinesis, pushing as much of her cloud of debris out of the way as she could. But it was hopeless. As crappy as her planning ability was, she had to admit that her telekinetic control was even worse. Build a N-dimensional fractal torus, easy as pie. Build it here rather than there? Or build it out of this material rather than that? Or - and this was the hardest part by far, for some ineffable reason - build it without creating a storm of debris that killed and maimed hundreds of bystanders? Well, that was practically impossible.
The two shard bearers were certain to take a hit, especially given the way that they were dancing about in the air like a pair of crazed loons. She would have to save them by guiding them to a safe landing on a protective cushion. Ah, there. She directed her telekinesis to the roof of the school gymnasium and ripped it off its foundations, pulling the roof up in the air to intercept the subjects.
Now, she wasn't stupid. After her first few hundred accidents, she had learned that subjects could get hurt by being thrown into roofs. So she worked carefully to protect the flying duo, using her precog to find a future where her butterfingered telekinesis would somehow manage to leave the pair without any lasting physical damage.
Aha. An acceptable future. The Bling bearer would get brain damage, but the Shaper bearer would heal her up in short order, as good as new. Mostly. Essentially. Well, whatever. Close enough.
...whoa, wait just a minute! Now that she inspected that future more closely, it seemed that the Shaper would heal up the Bling bearer better than new. An exceedingly high probability of enhanced affection, affinity, affiliation, affirmation - in short, love - between the two shard bearers in the future. Yay! That future was a keeper.
No sooner had she chosen the future than her postcog informed her that the shard bearers had just been knocked out of the sky with a satisfying smack. Yes, my dear little shard-bearing subjects! Get smacked in the head by my elegantly crafted cushion of metal in the name of love and justice! Through my devious manipulation of fate, you'll find your future looking up before you even know it! Believe it!
The Simurgh would have smiled, if she was the type to smile. She was helping. With a song in her heart, she turned to her next target.